Review

Looking through the discography of Mr. Joel Zimmerman (AKA Deadmau5), there’s one clear pattern: increasing variety. First, the ten-variations-on-one-beat flow of Random Album Title. Then more focus on separate songs, but still a very narrow range of sound and emotion on For Lack of a Better Name. Next, the every-type-of-dance-song 4 x 4 = 12. And now…this.

I’m going to say it straight up: >album title goes here< is not a great album. It is barely a good album. It’s too scattershot to succeed as a whole, and some songs do not sit well next to their neighbors. The album’s lowest moments are downright depressing. Opener Superliminal hits the ground running despite running on nearly the exact same concepts as previous opener FML- snare rolls and time signature changes. But then its momentum dies when the builds fail to pay off in any satisfying way. The second track, Channel 42, sits in a no-man’s land between build and drop and misses the highs and lows we’ve come to expect from Deadmau5 entirely. Not the best start to an album. Personally, having two highly mediocre tracks head an album is enough to throw me into a headphone-throwing rage.

October uses scratched-CD sound effects to spice things up but in the end, all it makes the listener wish for is an unscratched copy of the unremarkable jam. The lounge track, Sleepless, features painfully cheesy robo-vocals and is overall a boring, clumsy attempt to enter the genre. But the moment that takes the cake is the jaw-droppingly ugly transition from the brag-rap, redundant Failbait to the gorgeous closer Telemiscommunications. Imagine a movie with a celebratory strip club scene immediately followed a closing scene featuring the world’s cutest kitten surviving an operation.

I will probably never again try to listen to >album title goes here< as a whole album. There’s too much crap between the gold and both the beginning and end are somewhat painful to get through. However, that’s only one side to the story...

OMG:

I’m going to say it straight up: >album title goes here< is the most exciting album I’ve listened to this year, because it’s the album that best showcases Deadmau5’s talent and potential (albeit in a very flawed product). Deadmau5 has never been as overtly joyous as he is on The Veldt, or as lovably excitable as on Professional Griefers, or as sprawlingly beautiful as on Telemiscommunications. After hearing the solid (but just solid) Fn Pig which was supposed to be “the next Strobe,” I wasn’t expecting a driving beautiful Deadmau5 masterpiece on this album, but it comes in the form of Closer. And out of leftfield comes an industrial atmospheric masterpiece in Take Care of the Proper Paperwork.

Even where Deadmau5 doesn’t execute quite as well, he manages to succeed in some sense or another. Although Cyprus Hill’s obnoxious brag-rapping and terrible album placement do Failbait no favors, the beat itself is very well-done, with the classic sounds-like-gold Deadmau5 drum kit and a happy medium of bells-and-whistles details. Every song is meticulously well-produced, and no song is truly hard on the ears (the end of October perhaps excepted). The failed experiements on >album title goes here< are still experiments, and it’s enthralling to see how he handles each new genre and idea even when the results are iffy. It’s like seeing a talented, eager kid run through a gamut of new, improvised tricks- sometimes he crashes or ends up doing nothing special, but the courage and drive and passion is so clear in every movement that it’s awesome to behold.

WTF x OMG = 3/5

Deadmau5 has gone in all directions on this one to varying degrees of success. Fans will definitely find a lot to love here, and haters will have plenty to hate. It’s not a great album, but it’s an exciting and varied one. I’m sure glad I listened to it, and if you’ve been saving up to buy your Mau5 head or just like to poke your head around the contemporary electronic music scene, you will be too.

I'm on my 5th listen and I gotta say the only song I absolutely despise is Failbait. Every other track is sublime (except Professional Griefers, still on the fence about it) and you can't fault the Mau5 for branching out. Most people wanted variety after the monotony of the last couple albums so here it is. A lot of the tracks have an almost Daft Punk meets the progressiveness of "Strobe" feel. You may hate Joel as a person but you cannot deny the dude has talent.

Uh, I'm not the biggest fan of this album but only about half of the album borders on mainstream ebm stuff. In fact, there's more than a few nods to Random Album Title

Yeah, that's the other thing that I really hate about this new one: he's trying, forcing himself to go a bit back to his old sounds, but the actual tracks are so fucking terribly put together, it's not even funny. Plus the fact he's putting these more "hardcore" edm-tracks in the middle of a bunch of totally mediocre Guetta-like anthems to suggest variety or credibility is really painful to witness.

4x4 was already pushing it, but this new one is really where I stop caring for the Mau5...